A slow scream: trauma and madness in the biographemical early works of António Lobo Antunes

It is a major contribution to scholarship on Lobo Antunes that sheds light on questions of trauma and madness in his early novels, correspondence, and more recent short fiction by bringing to the fore Lobo Antunes’ experiences of, and reflections on, his roles as a veteran and a psychiatrist, as well as the considerable impact these experiences had in his writing. (…) The study represents, in my opinion, a very important contribution not only to studies in Portuguese and Portuguese-language literature, but to the area of Health Humanities as well. It will also be of interest to scholars working on the representation of violence and conflict, on post-imperialism, Comparative or World literature. (…) The monograph presents a clear and well-structured argument, which methodically addresses the corpus: correspondence and short fiction in the first three chapters, more closely linked to the biographical dimensions explored; Antunes’ first three novels in the final chapters. It does so while refining the critical lens so as to take into account the overlapping, interweaving dimensions of Lobo Antunes as a writer, a soldier and a psychiatrist.

dr Rui Miranda, University of Nottingham, UK